Africa Is a Country

People's Culture

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

People's Culture

By
Sean Jacobs

[vodpod id=Video.3322857&w=450&h=370&fv=]

Priceless footage of 1980s Community Arts Project in Durban, which, according to one of the founders, artist Bruno Brincat, was “… an idealistic arts project that was ahead of its time and got nixed by the apartheid authorities.”

“… During the making of this video the CAW was in its fourth year and beginning to take shape. Apart from hosting a variety of functions, it offered 20 classes and had 400 members. It had initiated classes to train teachers with a view of setting up satellite township projects. The video was made to help raise funds (primarily from America). Ironically, when the Durban City Council saw the video they withdrew the building and the project collapsed. We had already relocated three times in as many years and were unable to find another suitable location. The video was made with the assistance of the University of Natal and in particular Costa Criticos.”

[Thanks to Bruno Brincat; h/t Duke Bantu X ]

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.